1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an information distribution processing program, a computer, an information distribution processing method and an information distribution processing device to be used for distributing device information acquired from a device to a plurality of information processing units.
2. Related Art
Programs for acquiring device information on a device from the device via an interface and executing information processing by use of the acquired device information have widely been known as disclosed in Japanese Patent Provisional Publication No. 2000-293324, for example.
A printer status management program 3c described in the above patent document (paragraph [0072], FIG. 5) is configured to execute a process for acquiring information on a printer 2c through a port communication program 3e, a process for storing the acquired information in a storage area 3d, a process for supplying the information to an SNMP processing program 3b, etc.
However, in an information processing device capable of executing a plurality of processes in parallel in a time-sharing manner, a plurality of information processing tasks can be executed by a plurality of information processing units in parallel according to programs like the above printer status management program 3c. In such an information processing device, each of the information processing units can try to acquire information from one device and if the device is configured to supply information only once, even information originally supposed to be acquired by a particular information processing unit A can be taken first by another information processing unit B. In such cases, the information processing unit A can not acquire the necessary information.
Specifically, in a system configured so that a device prepares its device information only once at its own suitable timing and the device information is acquired by an information processing unit at its own suitable timing, if an information processing unit B first tries to acquire the device information after the preparation of the device information by the device and succeeds in the acquisition of the device information, an information processing unit A trying to acquire the device information later can not acquire the expected device information.